Below is part one of my article on the Democratic party and it’s demise. More specifically, on how a party that was historically the party of segregation and the south developed an undeserved reputation for progressivism, during an aberrant period in it’s history known as the New Deal Era.
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With the DNC less than a month away, and more and more Bernie Sanders supporters signing Bernie or Bust pledges, with Bloomberg and Reuters polling data showing between 44% and 55% of Bernie Sanders voters unwilling to accept Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and the DNC platform committees essentially intransigent on their rejection of Bernie Sanders agenda as anything an afterthought to the DNC platform, the time has really come for Progressives of all stripes to end their sado-masochistic abusive relationship with the Democratic Party.
It’s not like the Democrats have a long glorious history as the “People’s Party”; far from it. The years from Franklin Roosevelt’s election to Lyndon Johnson’s inglorious collapse are, if anything, a bizarre aberration in what was historically, the party of segregation and nativism.
As recently as the early 1970’s, the largest portion of the segregationist cause found it’s home in the Democratic Party. From the Dixiecrat movement of the 1950’s and early 1960’s to the failed candidacies of George Wallace from 1964 through 1976. In his 1976 bid, Wallace placed third in the popular vote in the Democratic primaries, behind Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown.
Carter’s own history of paying lip service to segregationists, as well as his place on David Rockefeller’s Trilateral commission, mark his presidency as the beginning of the Democrat’s long, slow slide back to it’s pre-New Dealer roots, as well as the dawn of it’s flirtation with neo-liberalist economic policy, which would blossom into a whole-sale embrace with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.
While Carter has become a much-beloved figure in his post-presidential life, it’s worth noting that nearly all of his cabinet came from David Rockefeller’s Trilateral commission, and it was during Carter’s presidency that deregulation, and give-backs by unions became a part of the American political discourse. In 1992, the election of Bill Clinton would cement the Rockefellerist international free trade movement as solidly to the DNC core as FDR had once cemented Social Democracy.
That this should now be the default setting of the DNC should come as no surprise to students of American political history: Woodrow Wilson had won the White House in a 3-way race between himself, Republican Howard Taft, and Progressive former president Teddy Roosevelt. While Wilson would appeal to African Americans in the north, he largely ignored them in the south and would screen the execrable “Birth of a Nation” for himself and guests at the White House while president. While describing himself as a Progressive, at a time when the Progressive movement was surging, he would none the less establish the Federal Reserve, an institution supported by John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and numerous international bankers, and passed the Sedition act and Espionage act (under which everyone from Emma Goldman to Edward Snowden wand Julian Assange would be charged, but which Hillary Clinton has miraculously skirted), targeted directly at draft resisters and labor organizers, and presided over the First Red Scare.
There’s little to be shown for the Democrats in the post Civil War era before Wilson. As this chart shows, they have been out of power for far longer than they have ever been in power, and in the post civil war era, pre-FDR, they barely existed, with only the hideous single-term of Andrew Johnson and the utterly forgettable Grover Cleveland in two non-contiguous terms.
If we study the rise of the Democrats from a regional fringe party of the south (which is all it was in the early post-civil war era) which would rarely eek out a victory through short-lived alliances with mid-atlantic labor interests, such as NYC’s notorious Tammany Hall, to the dominant party of the mid-20th century, then, we find that the Democrats did not usher in the Progressive-Social Democracy era of FDR through LBJ, but rather the opposite. The Progressives made the Democrats, NOT the other way around. In nearly all instances, the Democratic establishment had to be dragged screaming and kicking every step of the way to every accomplishment they now claim credit for, and at the first opportunity, in the wake of McGovern’s disastrous 1972 defeat, they have worked fervently at dismantling the very legacy they claim.
FDR, contrary to popular Democratic party myth, did not rise on a wave of popular support to seize the Democratic nomination with unified support of his party; he was, rather, a dark horse candidate who fought a contested convention against the party bosses, who, through fortune, were divided between the Tammany Hall political boss Al Smith and the segregationist southerner John Nance Garner, and only achieved the nomination through a devil’s alliance with Garner, in which Dixiecrat Garner gained the vice presidency in exchange for his delegates votes. For those who have criticized Roosevelt’s conspicuous lack of action on Jim Crow during his tenure, you need look no farther than Garner’s wing of the DNC for your explanation. Then as now, the south controlled a silent veto on the nomination.
FDR’s struggles with the DNC did not end with his election. Throughout his early years in office, Roosevelt’s New Deal was plagued with opposition from the American Liberty League, an organization of conservative Democrats founded by Al Smith, which included William Randolph Hearst and Prescott Bush, and many others from the corporate and financial world. Many other Democrats, including Roosevelt’s own vice-president, John Nance Garner, and prominent Democratic Senator Carter Glass of Virginia would attack Roosevelt for promoting “class warfare”. Among those who would be implicated in the alleged “Business Plot” to overthrow Roosevelt would be Hearst, Smith, Bush, Garner, conservative Democratic leader John W. Davis, and former DNC chair and GM executive John J. Raskob
All of this should sound very familiar to the supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Isn’t this the same rhetoric we’ve heard all year from the DLC alumni in the Clinton camp? This should come as no surprise. The Clintons and their allies are the direct heirs of this corrupt legacy. The Clintonian political machine bears more than a surface resemblance to the Tammany organization’s clubhouse patronage machinery of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Roosevelt’s challenges from the anti-New Deal Democratic bosses would reach a fevered pitch at the 1940 DNC where his choice of Henry Wallace as his running mate was met with a loud chorus of boos and the convention seemed on the brink of rebellion until Roosevelt threatened to decline the nomination, and leave the party without a candidate capable of defeating the popular and charismatic republican nominee, Wendell Wilkie.
The final triumph of the DNC establishment against Roosevelt would come in 1944, where the party bosses unceremoniously forced Henry Wallace from the Presidential ticket and replaced him with Missouri machine politician Harry S. Truman.
With Harry Truman, we see the return of the DNC party bosses to the forefront of Democratic policy making. Known as the “Senator from Pendergast” during his tenure in the US Senate, Truman was a machine politician’s machine politician. The prodigy of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast was the product of a corrupt patronage mill that would have made Tammany Boss Tweed blush. Bootlegging, organized crime, and even murder were the daily bread of the Pendergast political empire that made Truman’s political career, first electing him to a local judgeship, in spite of the fact that Truman had never attended even a day of law school, and his academic career consisted of 1 year of business school. A few years later, he would be elected presiding judge, in spite of still not even having a license to practice law. After holding a several other posts, also as the direct result of Pendergast’s patronage machine, he was elected a US Senator in 1934.
As a US Senator, he handed over federal patronage jobs to his patron, but otherwise towed the New Dealer line. As many of the New Deal’s critics have pointed out, it was through the dispensation of political patronage the FDR built support for his programs, and machine politicians like Truman were only too happy to vote for one project after another, as long as they controlled the distribution of the resultant pork. In spite of the inherent truth of this observation, FDR had contempt for the corrupt Democratic bosses, and largely ignored Truman during his senate tenure, seldom even returning his calls.
When Pendergast convicted on tax evasion charges in 1940, Truman nearly lost his seat to anti-corruption challengers, but was saved by the patronage of another political boss, Robert E. Hannegan, who would go on to secure the Veep spot for Truman at the 1944 DNC.
As president, Truman ushered in the era of the National Security State, and interventionist foreign policy that has defined the USA ever since. It’s worth noting that at the time Truman took office, the USA had the best educated population in the world and the best public education system on earth, the most extensive mass transportation network on earth, the largest shipping fleet on earth, and enjoyed more general good-will and envy than any other nation on earth. Within just more than a generation, all of this would be in ruins. While the policy positions of the Eisenhower administration would play a major role in bringing this enviable period to a close, its ruin would begin with Truman.
Truman had never really been his own man politically; he had always followed orders from a boss of one kind or another. Now, as Chief Executive Officer of the USA, he was suddenly out his depth. Truman needed a patron, and he would find one in the person of Winston Churchill.
Roosevelt’s goals for the post WWll world differed strongly with Churchill’s: Roosevelt was determined to establish US economic supremacy over the sclerotic British empire, and saw Stalin and Russia as the key to achieving this. Churchill, conversely, sought to preserve the British empire and ensure the independence of the central and east european states as a buffer between Britain and Russia. Each sought a separate arrangement with Stalin, and neither had concluded a solid agreement for post-wwll europe when Roosevelt died and Truman succeeded him.
Unlike Roosevelt, a Hudson Valley patrician whose family included several revolutionary war heros, including the founder of Rutgers university, the first chaplain of Columbia university and numerous NY regional politicians and business giants, as well as a legendary former US president, was hardly intimidated by Churchill’s royal background, but Truman, a failed businessman and puppet politician, found the patron he sought in Churchill.
To be continued……
